Customer Engagement & Dynamics CRM Forum

I am using the following link to create a custom API:

Create and use Custom APIs (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps

I have the plugin code all ready to go.

Does anyone know of better custom APIs tutorials on the internet, YouTube, etc?

I see so many videos on web APIs for Azure or on-premise but very few for custom APIs for Dynamics 365.

The documentation seems so promising. However once you get into it, the explanations are very close to Captain Obvious without much explanation or example. Take the following for instance directly from the Microsoft docs...

What do "Global", "Entity" and "EntityCollection" binding types mean in relation to this custom API? I need examples of this.

I am using the following link to create a custom API:

Create and use Custom APIs (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps

I have the plugin code all ready to go.

Does anyone know of better custom APIs tutorials on the internet, YouTube, etc?

I see so many videos on web APIs for Azure or on-premise but very few for custom APIs for Dynamics 365.

The documentation seems so promising. However once you get into it, the explanations are very close to Captain Obvious without much explanation or example. Take the following for instance directly from the Microsoft docs...

What do "Global", "Entity" and "EntityCollection" binding types mean in relation to this custom API? I need examples of this.

Custom APIs were only released to preview a few weeks ago, which is probably why you don't see much content around them yet. They are still in preview so don't use them yet for production apps - if you need to use something in production now then you can use a custom action, which is very similar.

Because custom APIs are essentially an evolution of custom actions, as  @Matt Beard said you can look at documentation around them for examples of bound vs. unbound.

While custom actions allowed you to have a global (unbound) action or an action bound to a specific entity, custom APIs also introduced the idea of being bound to an entity collection. In practical terms this means that your API has an implicit InputCollection parameter that is a query that defines the records that the API should be run on. There's some information on this in the Global & Bound APIs section of my blog post Matt mentioned.

------------------------------
Mark Carrington
Chief Technologist
Data8
Chester

Original Message:
Sent: Dec 18, 2020 12:02 PM
From: Rodrick Hales
Subject: "Better" Create Custom APIs Tutorials

I am using the following link to create a custom API:

Create and use Custom APIs (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps

I have the plugin code all ready to go.

Does anyone know of better custom APIs tutorials on the internet, YouTube, etc?

I see so many videos on web APIs for Azure or on-premise but very few for custom APIs for Dynamics 365.

The documentation seems so promising. However once you get into it, the explanations are very close to Captain Obvious without much explanation or example. Take the following for instance directly from the Microsoft docs...

What do "Global", "Entity" and "EntityCollection" binding types mean in relation to this custom API? I need examples of this.

------------------------------
Rodrick Hales
Vertex Aerospace
Madison
------------------------------

Custom APIs were only released to preview a few weeks ago, which is probably why you don't see much content around them yet. They are still in preview so don't use them yet for production apps - if you need to use something in production now then you can use a custom action, which is very similar.

Because custom APIs are essentially an evolution of custom actions, as  @Matt Beard said you can look at documentation around them for examples of bound vs. unbound.

While custom actions allowed you to have a global (unbound) action or an action bound to a specific entity, custom APIs also introduced the idea of being bound to an entity collection. In practical terms this means that your API has an implicit InputCollection parameter that is a query that defines the records that the API should be run on. There's some information on this in the Global & Bound APIs section of my blog post Matt mentioned.

I am using the following link to create a custom API:

Create and use Custom APIs (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps

I have the plugin code all ready to go.

Does anyone know of better custom APIs tutorials on the internet, YouTube, etc?

I see so many videos on web APIs for Azure or on-premise but very few for custom APIs for Dynamics 365.

The documentation seems so promising. However once you get into it, the explanations are very close to Captain Obvious without much explanation or example. Take the following for instance directly from the Microsoft docs...

What do "Global", "Entity" and "EntityCollection" binding types mean in relation to this custom API? I need examples of this.

@Mark Carrington How did you understand the feature was in Preview? Also, did you test this in all sandbox environment then ready to deploy to production and a no go?

Custom APIs were only released to preview a few weeks ago, which is probably why you don't see much content around them yet. They are still in preview so don't use them yet for production apps - if you need to use something in production now then you can use a custom action, which is very similar.

Because custom APIs are essentially an evolution of custom actions, as  @Matt Beard said you can look at documentation around them for examples of bound vs. unbound.

While custom actions allowed you to have a global (unbound) action or an action bound to a specific entity, custom APIs also introduced the idea of being bound to an entity collection. In practical terms this means that your API has an implicit InputCollection parameter that is a query that defines the records that the API should be run on. There's some information on this in the Global & Bound APIs section of my blog post Matt mentioned.

I am using the following link to create a custom API:

Create and use Custom APIs (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps

I have the plugin code all ready to go.

Does anyone know of better custom APIs tutorials on the internet, YouTube, etc?

I see so many videos on web APIs for Azure or on-premise but very few for custom APIs for Dynamics 365.

The documentation seems so promising. However once you get into it, the explanations are very close to Captain Obvious without much explanation or example. Take the following for instance directly from the Microsoft docs...

What do "Global", "Entity" and "EntityCollection" binding types mean in relation to this custom API? I need examples of this.